Lone Wolf: Reconciliation
by Allard-Liao
Summary: Jeremiah is settling into his new life rather nicely, but, all too soon, the smooth road runs out in a field of boulders.
1. Chapter 1

Lone Wolf: Redemption 2, Ch. 2

The Passage of Titans

Three seasons had passed since my marriage to Heather. Many in the pack were wondering when we were thinking about having pups, but we had never even thought of getting "busy" with each other. So far, the furthest we had gotten was sleeping on top of each other.

Lloyd had found a mate of his own, a lovely chestnut brown Alpha from the former Eastern pack. Whenever they both needed to hunt, Heather and I would baby-sit their two black-brown pups. On one such night, Brandon came charging into our den and darted behind me. "Hide me!" he whispered frantically.

"What is it, you old fox?"

"She's after me!" If it were possible for him to compress his body any smaller, he would have.

"Who?"

In answer, a single, gray-brown-furred fox paw poked over my back and a single claw pointed out of the den. Where he was pointing, a petite female wolf was prancing about, looking in all durations and crying, "Brandon! Brandon?" She sounded smitten.

I smiled and put a paw over my eyes. "It's just love-struck Karolyn. What is the problem?"

Before Brandon could answer, the she-wolf walked over to me and asked, "Have you seen Brandon anywhere?"

"Not in the past couple of minutes, no. You might want to check with Marcel. They do, after all, play golf together a lot."

"Thanks," she replied as she began to walk away. Then she stopped and added, "But I tracked his scent to your den."

"He was here a few minutes ago. Try looking in that direction." I pointed in the opposite direction from which Brandon had come.

"Thanks again," she finished as she ran off.

Brandon got up and walked around to the front of the den. "Thanks, man. I owe you one."

"Actually, Brandon. Scratch one of the favors I owed you from my run through Yellowstone."

"Still, thanks."

"So, tell me why I just lied to one of my best friend's daughters," I said with a playfully threatening tone as I pressed him down with a paw on his back.

Grunting from the pressure, he replied, "I'm not ready for a serious relationship yet."

I laughed and commented, "Come on. You have to find a mate some time. I know for a fact that you have been single for all four years that you have been alive. It's time to live a little, Brandon."

"Hey. If I want to have a girlfriend, I'd rather have a vixen than a she-wolf."

"I can understand that sentiment," I responded as I lifted my paw off of him. "Try to stay out of trouble, my friend."

"I give you my word. Though, I can't say the same of you," he retorted as he nodded toward the pups that were just waking up at my feet.

Then he turned tail and ran as I muttered, "Oh, crap."

A week later, we were asleep in our den when I heard a concerned voice request our names. I looked up and immediately asked, "What's wrong?" The wolf requesting us was Eve, and, for the first time I had ever seen, she looked distressed.

"Winston, he…come," she choked out with tears in her eyes. With that, she turned and walked away, tail drooping between her legs.

Both Heather and I, knowing that this was nowhere near the take-no-prisoners-Eve we knew, followed to see what was so tragic that she had undergone a full personality-reversal.

When we arrived, the realization of what the occasion was ended up hitting us with full force. We could hear the rattling coughs of a dying wolf and, as we were allowed past to join the group of Lily, Kate, Humphrey, Garth, Lloyd the Younger (the result of a rename when my brother Lloyd was found to be alive and well), Jasper, Kate and Humphrey's pups, and Church, we saw Winston lying on a bed of white flowers, emitting the coughs.

Immediately, Heather, the most sympathetic of the wolves in the den, rushed to the former head-Alpha's side and asked if there was anything she could do to help. He chuckled and quipped, "Just give me a few days and I'll be right as rain." He coughed, more violently this time, and added, "Seriously, there is nothing you can do, my eldest granddaughter. There is nothing that can help me right now, other than my death." Heather began to sob, but her grandfather lay a paw on her cheek, just below her eye, and said, "Don't cry for me, Heather. I've lived a good life. I've seen the merger of three packs into one. I've seen the packs turned away from the brink of a war that would have annihilated them all. I've even seen the barriers between the ranks dissolved." He then looked straight at me and made a final joke. "If you don't give us great-grandchildren before Eve goes, she'll pull you onto the deathbed with her and make you."

"Understood, sir," I replied as a last chuckle rippled through the twelve assembled wolves.

"Good," Winston sighed as he laid his head down on the bed. Watching his paw as it fell off of Heather's cheek and his chest as it stopped rising and falling, I saw the exact instant the old wolf died.

At that moment, I turned and exited the den. When I hit the open air, I raised my head and loosed my most mournful howl. Within a minute, the entire pack had joined in.

At the end of that week, Garth came in with distressing news of his own. His father, and Heather's other grandfather, Tony had also passed away from age. Unlike Winston, Tony had passed away peacefully, with almost no pain. Small favors. Now, Church and Eve were the pack Elders, head-Alphas. Within one week, the pack had lost two of its most legendary leaders. Now, we had to figure out how we would exist without them.


	2. Chapter 2

A week or so later, Reba, one of Shakey's unprecedented two mates, came limping to us crying tears and weeping blood from two bite wounds on her right rear leg. "Reba? God. Brandon, get Eve or Janice or one of the other healers." As the fox ran off, I brought the younger of the two vegetarian wolves into my den and laid her down on our bed of pine.

"Reba, what happened?" Heather asked.

"I was gathering herbs and berries up North when some Northern wolves ambushed me."

"Hold on. I'll get the head-Alphas." I ran over to Garth and Lilly's den. "The Northern wolves are making a move against us, I think."

"What makes you think that?"

"Some of them ambushed Reba."

After we went and delivered the same message to Kate and Humphrey, we went back to my den where Janice was already tending to her friend's wounds and Shakey was consoling his two wives. "Reba, tell us what happened," Kate demanded.

She stated the same sentence she told us and added, "They told me to tell you that they want a battle between their best five warriors and our five best. The winner gets the territory."

"And the resident pack?"

"They didn't say, but I think that we'd have to move out and find a new territory or die."

"Did they specify a time or place for this contest?"

"No and yes, respectively. They want us to contact them when we are ready to arrange a time for the fight, but the battleground they want is a small valley somewhere on the crossroads between the borders of all three territories, East, West, and North."

"I know where it is," Humphrey replied as he nodded his head. "Because of where it is, no pack has truly claimed it, a no-wolves' land, if you will."

"Wait. Reba, why are you so sure that we will lose?"

"Jeremiah, the Northern wolves have the second-best fighters in the entirety of Jasper Park; they are only a small step behind the Southern wolves," Garth admonished.

"Oh."

We then heard someone clear his throat behind us. We looked and saw my father. "Because of the struggles our pack survived, I believe that the Glacier Bay wolves are some of the best fighters that exist," he stated with combined pride and humility.

"We shall see," Garth said before he howled for a pack gathering. When the entire pack, all ninety-four members, was assembled outside our den, he announced, "The Northern pack has issued a challenge for our territory. They, knowing that we have superior numbers, have decided to pit their five best warriors against our five best. Thus, for the next five days, we shall have contests of strength, stamina, speed, and combat skill to determine our five best warriors. Rest up tonight, for the contests start tomorrow."

As he walked back in, I warned him, "Some of us might get killed in those contests."

"No, I will strictly tell them not to kill each other."

"And if lethal accidents happen?"

He was silent for a few seconds, and then he replied, "I hadn't thought of that."

"Tomorrow, I'll scout the area…"

"No, you're one of our best. Have Salty do it…" Heather began to object.

"No, I'll do it," my dad interjected, cutting her off. "I am too old to be a viable candidate for one of our five best warriors, but I know enough about combat to know what to look for in a combat area."

"Well, I'll go with you," Eve added, "I know where it is and know the valley and surrounding mountains well."

"Lead the way, my lady."

As I watched them walked off, I asked Kate, "Is your mother using my father to distract her from her grief?"

"I dunno, maybe."


	3. Chapter 3

The first contest was a long marathon to test for stamina and speed. Somewhere between forty and fifty of us, from all ranks and ages, decided to compete, and Garth agreed that the top twenty finishers would move on to the next contest.

The race would take us in a spiraling, ovular circuit around the core and perimeter of the Eastern and Western territories. I looked along the line and was most surprised to see, just seven slots down, my brother, Lloyd the Elder. I slunk down the line until I was standing right next to him and queried, "Have mercy on yourself, Lloyd. You can't possibly hope to compete against these fully healthy, younger wolves."

"I have a duty to my pack. I failed the day that we both nearly died. I will do my best not to fail this time." From his tone, I knew that he would not yield on this point.

And then Lilly howled, signaling the start of the race.

It was a grueling path, but I ended up finishing fourth, behind Humphrey (surprisingly), Hutch, and Garth, and just ahead of Heather. My greatest surprise came when I found that, while my brother did not have the speed that many of the other wolves had, he certainly had a surplus of endurance; he was able to keep his pace for far longer than any of the wolves in the pack and came in as the eleventh finisher.

"Surprised?" he asked, his voice barely showing signs of exertion.

"Very," I replied. Heck, "very surprised" might as well have been the understatement of the century.

"With the years that have passed since the injury, I have learned to compensate for the loss of my depth perception that went away with my eye…" He lifted a paw and rubbed at his empty eye socket. "…and the slight loss of mobility that occurred when the hunter's bullet pierced my hip. Those two injuries and their compensations have given me a unique insight of the world."

"I am not surprised at that."

Then came the test of strength. It was rather simple, consisting only of doing tree squats; the twist was that the tree in question weighed easily more than twice the weight of an average wolf and those who would qualify had to do more than forty of them. It was at this point that my brother's injured hip betrayed him; the pain caused his leg, and therefore him, to collapse only a little past thirty squats.

Three others out of the twenty had also failed, but that was little consolation for him. "I failed."

"What matters is that you tried your hardest."

"Maybe. I still failed."

I myself had passed with fifty-two tree squats; Heather had washed out with only thirty-nine; Humphrey had settled for the minimum forty-one; Garth, show-off that he was, achieved over seventy; and Hutch had nearly achieved fifty.

While I was rather proud of my fifty-two, I knew that the tests I most dreaded were about to happen: the tests of combat skill.

However, when I thought on that point, I realized that it had been a good thing that Heather had washed out by then.

Another point I suddenly dreaded, as I gazed upon the fifteen other wolves that were going to be in the combat challenges, was that my dad had been right. Of the sixteen wolves that were still in the running, all but six (unless you counted me in that category, in which case it was all but five) were from the Northeast Glacier Bay Pack. Most of them, including Francis, I had gotten to know before the first Hunter Incident had forced my exile. The rest were wolves who had been born just before I had been forced to leave, but their scars showed that they had been old enough to fight when Lionel had attacked.

I knew that the next day or so would not be fun. My sore spine was already complaining enough as I stretched and a series of pops and cracks ran down its whole length.

However, the night in my den with Heather, both of us encouraging and comforting each other, soothed my body far more than any herbal poultice either of the vegetarians could come up with.


	4. Chapter 4

I rolled under the other wolf's swipe, narrowly avoiding having my ear vented by the wolf's claws. As I finished my roll, I leaned heavily on my front limbs and kicked him in the side of the face. He staggered back as I pivoted on my forelegs. As he recovered, I lunged to tackle him, but he rolled with the impact and kicked me off. That wouldn't have been so bad except for the fact that I landed on a rather sharp rock, cutting open my hip. Despite the pain, I pulled myself back to my feet.

The reason we were both so unwilling to give up was that ours was one of the last combats to determine the final five wolves who would be defending our territorial claim against the Northern wolves. The system that had been agreed on was to have one-on-one combats to whittle the number of candidates to four, thus filling the first four slots, and then there would be a Battle Royale for the fifth slot. None of the wolves had wanted to be one of the combatants in that final battle.

So far, three of the first four slots had been filled, all by Jasper Park wolves. They were Garth (highly expected), Hutch, and (surprisingly) Humphrey.

I and another Northeast Glacier Bay wolf, named Kraig, were fighting for the fourth slot. We had been fighting for the past half an hour, and still there seemed to be no clear advantage between us. However, I could tell that we were both beginning to tire. "Give up?" I asked, panting.

"Don't bet on it."

Before we could strike each other again, a howl demanded that all wolves of the pack assemble near the northern border of the territory. "We'll finish this later, Kraig," I muttered as I took off to answer the call.

"You bet we will," he replied as he began to follow.

However, when we arrived, all thoughts of the battle were blown from my mind. "Dad!"

He was limping along, using his body to hold up Eve's, which had been ravaged. While most of her wounds were minor and already healing, there was one that would not heal ever again: her front right paw was torn away. While the stump wasn't bleeding, it appeared that she had lost a lot of blood, as she was barely responsive enough to keep her remaining paws moving.

My father was in better shape, marginally, with wounds all over his body that would leave scars, but he wasn't maimed in any way. Janice, Reba, and a few of the other healers rushed to carry Eve somewhere where they could tend to her injuries and attempt to nurse her back to health.

He sat down heavily and winced as pain clearly shot through his entire body. "Dad? Who did this to you?" I asked.

"I don't know. Some kind of super-wolf or something. It was fast, strong. More so than any wolf I've ever seen. Bigger, too. Had paws like yours."

I gulped, having a sneaking suspicion of what it was that the two elder wolves had encountered. "Dad, were you bitten?"

"No. Neither of us was. It just batted us around like we were squirrels. I've never been beaten that badly. Eve caught the worst of it; she's a tough scrapper."

"Yeah. We saw the paw…"

"No. The paw was the least of what she caught. Strange thing was, after it beat us, the wolf sliced one of its own forepaws open and let the blood drip onto her wounds. I will tell you, that wolf is not from this Earth, for, where its blood touched, her claw wounds began closing, like this," he replied as he pressed his paws together, slowly. "Seconds later, the worst of them were simply gone. Same with the paw the wolf had cut."

"Oh, no."

"What is it, Jer?" Garth asked.

"This might sound a little crazy, but I am positive that what Dad and Eve fought was a werewolf."

"A what?" my father asked.

"You mean those human-wolf creatures you mentioned your human friend was interested in?" Lilly asked.

"The very same," I replied with a nod. I paced for a moment while I pondered what I knew. Finally, I sighed and said, "I'll go and take care of the beast."

"Why?" Heather demanded.

"When the werewolf's territory runs dry of prey, it will search for new prey. Having fought Dad and Eve, it will track your scent when that time comes. It will come for us."

"So why you?"

"Because I know how to kill a werewolf. No one else in the pack does."

"Teach us then."

"No," I growled. Then my shoulders and head slumped. "I'm sorry, but, if I fail, you will need to get the pack out of Jasper. Also, if I fail, it will only be my life that is wasted, and my body will stall the werewolf for-"

"Don't say another word," Heather growled. "I, at least, am going with you and nothing will change that.

"As am I," Garth pledged. One by one, practically every wolf in the pack who was in fighting shape had demanded to assist me in hunting the werewolf.

The response was something I had never expected, and my jaw dropped open in shock.


End file.
